Just found this little Gnome utility that puts a ruler on your screen so you can measure things: Gnome Screen Ruler. Unfortunately it is not in the Debian/Ubuntu repositories, so you have to compile it yourself, especially if you are running amd64.

I found good compilation instructions (there are quite a few problems) on GnomeFiles. I attached the amd64 deb file, it may work for you: gruler-0.

If you are running several computers (desktop and/or laptop) and you are tired of switching keyboards and mice all the time the have a look at synergy. It is a software keyboard and mouser switcher and it also integrates the clipboard and the screensaver. You can move your mouse across all your monitors and it automatically switches computers for you.

I am using it with a Linux desktop (Ubuntu 5.10) and a Mac OS laptop. The main issue I run into was the fact the Ubuntu provides an older version (1.2.2) and this had problems with the Alt/Cmd key getting stuck on the laptop. Quite annoying. Installing the latest version fixed the problem, here are the necessary steps:

Some multimedia keys on some keyboards are not seen at all in Ubuntu. If you go to System / Preferences / Keyboard Shortcuts and you try to set one of these key then nothing happens when you press them. Another test is to start xev and notice that no events are generated while hitting these keys. In most cases the problem is that the system is not mapping any key codes to the corresponding scan codes of these keys. To test this and also to find out the scan code just watch the kernel message log, in a terminal window type:
$ tail -f /var/log/messages
...and now hit those invisible keys.

A message in the log file will tell you to run setkeycode and it gives you the actual scan code. There are two things that you now have to figure out: an unused key code and hot to automatically run setkeycodes when the system starts.

Today I just discovered another cool tool: man2html. Funny enough, I saw it mentioned in a Mac OS hints blog. man2html allows you to see the local man pages in your favorite browser.

In order to install man2html on an Ubuntu box do the following:

• Install the man2html package through Synaptic or apt-get
• Make sure you have apache2 installed and running
• Now you can just go to the following URL: http://localhost/cgi-bin/man/man2html :-)

You can also use the command line using hman instead of man:

The Command Line Helper I was imagining back in February 2005 was born on January 3^rd, 2006: EveryGUI. It is a brand new application registered on SourceForge and its creator is Jeffrey Bakker.

I am really glad to see someone working on a project like this! I will try to get it up and running on my Ubuntu box during the next few days.

And one more Nautilus script that will run meld to show differences between selected files. Meld knows about cvs and subversion so you can select one single file or folder if they are under revision control and meld will show local changes.

diff-1.0.tar.gz

I wrote a simple Nautilus script that will copy the names of the selected files to the clipboard. It is using a small utility called xclip which allows you to control the clipboard from the command line.

copy-filenames-1.0.tar.gz

A simple script that will help you to write or debug Nautilus Scripts. Just copy it to your scripts folder (~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts) and then select some files in Nautilus, right click and select Scripts / NautilusScriptsDebug.

Version 1 of the script: NautilusScriptsDebug-1.0.tar.gz.

This script helped with the tracing of a couple of recent issues with Nautilus Scripts.

Based on the CVS Nautilus Scripts written by Gavin Brown I wrote a set of scripts for subversion. You can right click on a subversion managed file or folder (you can also multiple select) and then select a command from the Subversion submenu. All scripts will give feedback using a zenity message box.

The most important commands are right in the Subversion menu. Not so often used commands are in the Subversion/More... submenu and property related commands are in Subversion/Properties....

Download: nautilus-svn-scripts-0.9.tar.gz nautilus-svn-scripts-0.9.2.tar.gz

A new tool for webmasters from Google: Sitemaps. The idea seems to be to provide a special xml file to search engines to help the index your site. Google also provides a Python script that helps you create a sitemap for your site.

The next step will be for content management systems to automatically generate these sitemaps. WordPress already has a plugin for this.